At all the major tech conferences I attend, all the alpha geeks and the fashionistas are walking around with Mac’s (hmmm….am I a geek or a bon vivant? I know what my kids would say!). I often find myself in the front of an audience and scanning the crowd of people with their laptops is interesting…but there is an accelerating number of glowing Apple logos at these places where influencers meet.

I’m getting together with a friend and colleague tomorrow for one key reason *and* because he too took delivery of a new Macbook Pro last week. This is a guy that has used Windows machines his entire life.

Even the dyed-in-the-wool PC guy, Chris Pirillo, has gone Mac.

My 18 year old daughter works at a local Apple Store and we talk often about how busy the place is all the time. Whenever I go there, it’s a constant and steady stream of purchasers. She’s indicated that this back-to-school season is "awesome" with sales even though no analyst would buy more stock due to THAT recommendation.

It’s funny…when I bought my Macbook Pro some time ago I purchased Parallels and an OEM version of Windows XP for $49 (and I threw away the $10 sound card I had to buy to get it) thinking that I’d need to continue to run Windows apps. You know what? In six months I’ve opened it up about 10 times. I play with my install of Ubuntu Linux more than I use Windows.

Why is this happening? The platform works; it’s elegant and quiet; based on unix; secure with no spyware or adware; great user interface; perfectly positioned for user generated content; compatible with Windows in many ways; in short, about anything people want to do today (other than Windows-centric proprietary applications) can be done with a Mac.